Sleaze Bag of the Week Paul Ryan (R-WI) - His Votes in Congress Added $6.8 Trillion to Our Nation’s Federal Deficits
The reputation of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as a fiscal hawk is at odds with his record of supporting nearly every single budget-busting law of the past decade. Since 2001 he has voted for at least 65 separate pieces of deficit- and debt-increasing legislation, with the total tab for all those votes a whopping $6.8 trillion in cumulative deficits.
Rep. Ryan has served as a member of the House of Representatives since 1998. That year the budget was in surplus and stayed that way for the next three years. But with the start of the George W. Bush administration came the return of the red ink. In January 2001, before any Bush administration policies had been passed, the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, was projecting budget surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion over following decade. Instead, we got cumulative deficits totaling $6.1 trillion, an $11.7 trillion difference. CBO estimates that laws passed by Congress and signed by Presidents Bush and Barack Obama are responsible for $8.5 trillion of that difference. Rep. Ryan cast his vote for about 80 percent of that $8.5 trillion.
Indeed, during the period when the bulk of the deficit-increasing legislation was passed during the Bush administration Rep. Ryan’s record as a fiscal hawk is even more dismal. From 2001 to 2008, Congress passed and President Bush signed legislation that increased the deficit (just in that period) by a cumulative $4 trillion (policies passed during those years added over $6 trillion to the deficits through 2011). Rep. Ryan voted for well over 90 percent of that. (see figure 1).
Those debt-increasing votes began with the first round of Bush tax cuts—estimated at the time to reduce the projected surplus by nearly $1.3 trillion—and continued with every subsequent round of tax cuts. In total, since 2001 Rep. Ryan voted for over $2.5 trillion worth of deficit-financed tax cuts.
Rep. Ryan also voted, repeatedly, to increase federal spending without paying for it. Most notably, he voted in support of every single defense spending bill over the past 11 years. These votes, on both the regular defense appropriations bills and on a series of “emergency supplementals,” have added nearly $1.9 trillion to the deficit since 2001.
Rep. Ryan also voted numerous times to increase nondefense spending. Of course, the most well-known of these votes was on Medicare Part D, which added over $270 billion in unpaid-for spending. But there are many lesser-known examples. In 2002 he voted for an agriculture bill that added $80 billion to the deficit. He voted for changes to military retirement in 2003 that cost $20 billion in added spending. And he voted for increased borrowing authority for flood insurance that increased federal spending by $17 billion.
Rep. Ryan also voted in favor of many of the annual appropriations bills that authorized spending increases for “nondefense discretionary programs.” To be sure, Rep. Ryan occasionally voted against a handful of these, but the net effect of all of his votes was to increase nondefense spending by $1.3 trillion.
All told, Rep. Ryan voted in favor of increasing federal spending by $3.2 trillion—all without offsetting the costs. Combined with his support for $2.4 trillion in tax cuts, Ryan’s votes contributed to adding trillions of dollars to the national debt, which itself led to more spending as the interest payments on that debt grew. Put it all together, and Rep. Ryan voted for over $6.8 trillion worth of cumulative deficits over the past 11 years.
Republicans have always been big spenders. They just never pay for what they put on the tax payer credit card. So the borrowed money has to be paid, plus interests. They know that the general public regularly votes to throw out whoever is in power. That makes it easy to blame Democrats who inherit the crazy irresponsible debt that Republicans leave behind. Republicans cat this way because of the twisted psychology of the right-wing conservative mind. They hate democracy, the had the concept of government by and for the people, so they just do not care how much damage they do to America as long as it benefits the Republican party. Today's icing on the lying hypocrite cake - Paul Ryan denied he sought stimulus fundsQuestioned, he acknowledges his requests. When you get close to Ryan that stink is the thick layer of unwashed hypocrisy.
